jakejonesiv

Have you considered that these passages might have been interpolated into an earlier version of the Pauline material, for the specific reason of battling Marcion's conception of a docetic Christ?

Jake Jones IV

Ben C Smith

Why? Because disincarnate spirits are ahistorical? Quetzalcoatl and Zeus are ahistorical, too. Or because disincarnate spirits are not really human? Quetzalcoatl and Zeus are not really human, either.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

If seeing Paul as a mythicist depends on the originality of the Marcionite version of his epistles, I would regard that as significant progress in the debate.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

Hi Chris,

How do you know what Paul thought? Seriously, because this gets to the heart of the whole debate.

Are you assuming that when we open the latest edition of Nestle-Aland that we are reading letters by the alleged first century Apostle in their original form?

Are you confident that they remained unsullied between the time of composition and the earliest extant manuscripts? Even though this time encompasses the great christological debates of the second century, when there would be every motivation to modify them?

Remember, these battles were exactly over what we are discussing: Was Jesus a flesh and blood human being or a docetic phantom? What was the content of the Pauline material?

Given all that, what is your confidence level that the Pauline letters we have before us today existed in identical form in the first century. 100%? 50%? 20%? 0% What?

I have grown weary of the headbanging debate tactics (with UFO's no less!). :banghead: I really want to know what everyone thinks after considering this issue.

Thanks!

Jake Jones IV

No Robots

Iasion:



It surprises me that you refer to Roger Pearse. Here he demolishes the egregious quotation mining of Hoffman common in what he calls "atheist hate posts". He specifically debunks the "quotation" that you use. Pearse also makes clear that above and beyond the manipulation of Hoffman, Hoffman himself has created his reconstruction of Celsus on nothing but speculation. Pearse even calls it "fiction".

Amaleq13

As I parenthetically suggested, it might be more accurate to say he was calling for reform on the part of his fellow Jews but it is clearly within the context of Judaism. Mark 2:17 is probably the first indication of this:

"I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

I consider "founder" to require active involvement in the founding of a movement and what you describe seems more like the source of inspiration for the actual founder.

That's where the religion, as it exists today, appears to have gotten its start.

Paul is clearly describing the birth of a new religion while James and Simon appear to have been trying to change certain traditional Jewish beliefs while retaining most.

For my part, this sub-discussion has been an effort to provide an understanding of rlogan's statement.

Didymus

The gap between the end of Pilate's reign and the writing of Mark is at least 36 years, and probably more. I agree, that's not a huge gap, but there are factors other than chronological gaps which tend to blur and mythologize events.

What about distance? Despite the claims that gospel Christianity originated in Jerusalem, all the evidence seems to suggest that gospels described events that were not merely "long ago," but far away too. There's no evidence that the gospels were written or first propagated in Jerusalem. Most scholars think they were written in Antioch, Alexandria, Aleppo and other cities of the region. Such distances, coupled with four or more intervening decades, can render verification of events virtually impossible.

It's a tangential point and an argument from silence, but: Other than the gospels themselves, including Luke's claim of mass conversions in Jerusalem, there's no literary, archeological or epigraphic evidence that the residents of first-century Jerusalem were aware of Jesus' trial and execution. Even Paul does not mention those events when he relates his visit to "the Jerusalem Pillars," Peter and James. (I'm not sure of the dates of Paul's visit, but I think it was probably in the 50's.) This glaring lack of confirmation supports the view that the gospel writers were describing events as they MIGHT or SHOULD or MUST have happened, rather than as they really happened.

Intervening events can obscure the past, too. There was a major war in Judea 66 -70. The Romans destroyed the Temple; many Jews were taken into slavery or fled to the cities of the Diaspora, leaving Jerusalem and Jewish institutions in a state of chaos. Under those circumstances, Mark, writing in Alexandria, had complete freedom of expression. There would have been no way to verify his account.

Seems like these factors should also be taken into account when assessing the probable veracity of the gospels.

Didymus

Ben C Smith

Paul goes out of his way to admit or assert that he was the last known apostle called to the movement, that even otherwise unknowns were in the movement before him, that he persecuted the movement before joining it, that the missions to the circumcised and to the uncircumcised were two facets of the same movement, that the mission to the circumcised preceded his own to the uncircumcised, and that what he received from God was in no way inferior to what was already available to the movement.

I think the hypothesis that Paul was the founder of this movement needs to be tweaked. He might have initiated sweeping changes, reforms, and new directions, but WalMart does not cease to be WalMart when it decides to go international.

Ben.

jjramsey

There are two big problems that I see here. First, getting the references to fit with the flow of the text and not stand out as foreign intrusions is a problem. Second, getting the interpolations in all the extant copies is problematic, considering how widely the copies were distributed. You are talking about something close to organized tampering, which would be tough to orchestrate.

I am leery of an interpolation argument in which the only sin of the suspect text is that it conflicts with one's hypothesis.

Ben C Smith

Any gap of less than a lifetime is hardly enough to qualify ipso facto as positive evidence against the data.

With the events of the Pentateuch we have to go out of our way to imagine mechanisms whereby the account could have been preserved with anything approaching accuracy. With the events of the gospels we do not. Mechanisms abound. Some of those mechanisms (especially oral tradition, in which I have very little faith) may well have introduced legend and fabrication into the story, but that the very existence of a man, along with some of the things that made him distinctive, could be preserved for three or four decades is hardly something to scratch our heads over.

Agreed. But this distance is not a huge obstacle, either; not huge enough to turn it into a positive argument. We are not talking about Meso-American or Japanese provenances for the gospels.

Strictly speaking, verifying the events is not the issue on this thread. It is falsifying them (and not even them, really, but the existence of the one reputed to have done them). The time and distance involved here may make it harder for someone to actively argue for historicity in some respects, but they do not in and of themselves form an argument against it, IMHO.

You are correct: It is an argument from silence. (And the first Pauline visit to Jerusalem was in the thirties on the standard chronologies.)

I think Rome, but so be it.

Again not a positive argument against historicity, but rather a way of accounting for ahistoricity once we have demonstrated it by other means.

Agreed; they ought to be taken into account.

Thanks for the response.

Ben.